Land of the Lost (and why kids don't need drugs)

Yesterday I received an early birthday present from the little lady: The complete series of Land of the Lost on DVD!

This devious little gift all but guarantees I will be spending a good portion of my weekend "lost" in the "land" of my own pathetic nostalgia— at least during those spare moments when I'm not busy moving my entire life to Washington, DC.

Land of the Lost was one of those uber-cheap Sid & Marty Krofft children's shows in the 70s that look like they were made in some guy's basement during a three day peyote binge. At the time, of course, I had no idea they were so cheaply made. Every part of me wanted to believe that these painted-foam rocks and clumsily rendered clay dinosaurs were real. Cartoons like Land of the Lost offered adventure, tapping into the basic wanderlust that children have for imaginary worlds.

Nor were the overt psychedelic overtones obvious to me. Maybe it was a sign of how pervasive the "counterculture" drug culture had become that it began influencing children's programming and McDonald's commercials. (Good God! What were they putting in those Happy Meals back then?)

Sid & Marty Krofft probably reached their trippy zenith during their run of H.R. Pufnstuf. With its promise of taking magical trips, the show's intro was essentially an advertisement for getting high:

It is only through the perspective of less innocent eyes, however, that I can correctly understand the lyrics. "Can't do a little 'cause you can't do enough?" Did Keith Richards help them write this song? One clue to interpreting the lyrics is the simple fact that you can't even say the name of the cartoon without uttering the phrase "puffing stuff." How the generation of kids growing up during these 70s even learned to their shoes is beyond me.

A few years back, the HBO comedy show Mr. Show ran a brilliant parody of Sid and Marty Krofft:

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Sadly, this sketch pretty much nailed it!

And yet I look forward with childish glee to watching these videos. The truth is that the Sid & Marty Krofft cartoons evoke in me the most wholesome feelings of nostalgia imaginable— their string of perverse drug references doing nothing more than bringing me back to a time when I was innocent (and before I discovered that little else in this world was.)

The fact is that most of my memories from childhood have a slightly hallucinatory cast, probably because there's something naturally psychedelic about being a child. Children simply haven't carried around their consciousness long enough to become invested in the world as it is, and part of the allure of childhood is a willingness to find colorful new worlds beneath the fussy and obstinate forms of daily reality.

It is only adults who learn to habitualize their sobriety and need the crutch of drugs to temporarily escape it. For children, the world has a naturally kaleidoscopic glow that makes the notion of "getting high" essentially redundant.